Sr Applied Scientist - Robotics Simulation, Amazon Robotics R&D

About the role

We are looking for a Senior Applied Scientist to join the Robotics Simulation team at Amazon Robotics. This role combines deep traditional robotics expertise (kinematics, dynamics, control, motion planning) with fluency in modern Physical AI approaches (imitation learning, vision-language-action models, world models, diffusion policies). You will be the technical anchor who bridges the gap between what works in simulation and what works on real robots.

This is not a pure research role: you will work directly with real robot hardware, simulation environments, and production deployment pipelines, ensuring that learned policies transfer reliably from GPU-accelerated simulation to physical robots operating in Amazon fulfillment centers. While this role is expected to engage with the research community and may produce publications, the primary measure of success is deployed robot capability, not paper count. We value scientists who ship.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical robotics direction for the team's Physical AI program, spanning simulation environment design, policy training, sim-to-real transfer, and real-world validation across multiple robotics platforms.
• Mentor junior applied scientists and engineers on robot learning best practices, helping them diagnose sim-to-real gaps, debug policy failures on hardware, and iterate toward deployable solutions.
• Design and execute sim-to-real transfer strategies, including system identification, domain randomization, physics parameter tuning, and visual domain adaptation, drawing on both classical and learned approaches.
• Architect policy training pipelines that combine teleoperation data, synthetic demonstrations, reinforcement learning, and imitation learning (e.g., VLA models, diffusion policies, behavior cloning) for manipulation tasks.
• Lead sim-to-real analysis: define metrics and methodologies for evaluating simulation fidelity, identifying where simulation diverges from reality, and prioritizing modeling improvements that impact downstream policy performance.
• Collaborate with hardware teams on robot embodiment modeling, ensuring that digital twins accurately capture kinematics, joint dynamics, actuator limits, contact behavior, and sensor characteristics.
• Evaluate and integrate state-of-the-art approaches from the Physical AI research community (foundation models for robotics, world models, action-chunking transformers, generalist policies) into the team's simulation and training infrastructure.
• Contribute to end-effector modeling and physics tuning, ensuring physically plausible contact interactions and accurate tool behavior in simulation across diverse manipulation hardware.
• Drive technical design reviews, author high-level design documents, and set the scientific direction for simulation fidelity and robot learning initiatives.

Qualifications

• PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience.
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language.
• Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning.

Preferred Qualifications

• Broad experience across a range of physics simulators (IsaacSim, IssacLab, MuJoCo, Drake, etc.), both as a sim “power-user” and technical developer.
• First-hand experience in sim2real transfer (i.e. developing learned policies in sim and successfully getting them to work on real robots).
• Experience in closing sim2real gaps both in terms of visual fidelity and physics fidelity.
• Deep expertise in robotics (controls, motion planning, perception, etc.), ideally both in the context of manipulation and locomotion.
• Deep expertise in reinforcement learning, especially in the context of robotics.
• Experience with VLAs and using simulation for data generation and benchmarking.
• Experience with ROS2.

About The Team

The Robotics Simulation team is a ~30-person multidisciplinary organization of SDEs, Applied Scientists, and Technical Artists at Amazon Robotics. We build the simulation infrastructure that powers Physical AI development, from photorealistic synthetic data to GPU-accelerated training environments. Our simulation infrastructure enables robots to be designed, trained, and validated entirely in simulation before physical hardware exists, compressing development timelines and de-risking hardware programs across Amazon Robotics.

The team currently delivers end-to-end simulation stacks for Amazon's robotics programs, including high-fidelity robot digital twins, teleoperation data collection infrastructure, scalable synthetic demonstration generation, VLA/diffusion policy training and inference pipelines, domain randomization for visual and physics sim-to-real transfer, and model validation in simulation. We partner closely with hardware teams, science organizations, and robotics program leads across Amazon Robotics.

This role reports into the Robotics Simulation organization and carries technical influence across broader partner teams (hardware engineering, science organizations, robotics program leads). You will not only shape direction within the simulation team but serve as the technical bridge connecting simulation fidelity decisions to real-world robot performance across multiple programs.

Benefits

• Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage
• Maternity and Parental Leave Options
• Paid Time Off (PTO)
• 401(k) Plan

Pay

USA, CA, Sunnyvale - 192,200.00 - 260,000.00 USD annually

USA, MA, Westboro - 167,100.00 - 226,100.00 USD annually

USA, WA, Bellevue - 167,100.00 - 226,100.00 USD annually

Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location.